by Ibi Zoboi
“It was surreal. But real. Except for the fact that I was talking to a slave in my great-granny Mae’s basin.”
“I don’t know what that means. Don’t want to know. But seriously, Danté. This is like the fifth crazy dream. You should talk to someone.”
He means the counseling center.
Maybe I do need to talk to someone, but what do I say? How do I explain that I can actually feel the weight of him—of John? How do I even start?
I don’t close my eyes to get those last winks of sleep. I’m up and have to get my head right for the shoot. I shower, steam—this time without John staring up at me—dress, grab my makeup kit, and catch the train.
Usually my dreams fade to nothing when I wake up. Or, when I wake up I remember only one thing. And barely. But I can’t stop thinking about John, seeing his teeth, hearing his laugh, or the snap of that whip.
The photographer tries to get me to smile. “More, Danté. More. More teeth, Danté.” And then I lose it. And lose the gig.
On the train ride back to the dorms, my phone buzzes nonstop. I glance each time, but never answer. I’m in no mood to talk to the booking agent. I mean, what do I say? What? I can’t talk about the shoot without talking about John. And that’s not a talk I can have with the agent. Or my roommate. Or just about anyone.
That night I try to conjure John again. Tell him how he cost me my tuition. Hear what he had to say about that. John never shows. And I just sleep. Wake. Shower. Dress. Grab my sketchbook. Go to class. Draw sketches of John instead of the cuffs, collars, and sleeves I’m supposed to draw for my History of American Fashion class.
Besides John, Great-Granny Mae is on my mind, so we FaceTime.
It’s clear that I get my fashion sense from Great-Granny Mae. She wears a silver wig, huge square glasses, and a pearl necklace, and is dressed in a light-green suit, stockings, and orthopedic pumps, even though she’s not going anywhere but inside her apartment.
Her aide, a hunched-over woman who could probably use an aide herself, wraps a shawl around my great-granny Mae’s shoulders and sits away from us to give us some privacy. Well. It’s never quite private. She’s always there.
I start with the bad news first. That I got fired from the modeling shoot and won’t have my tuition money together. Then I tell her all about my dream and John. Great-Granny Mae laughs so long and so hard, I see where I get my teeth from. Her aide takes her time getting out of her chair but makes it over to her, to pat her back. Great-Granny shoos her away.
The first thing she tells me is not to worry. Seeing her laugh like that makes me feel a little better. From there, it’s easier to tell her the rest, which makes her laugh even harder.
“Never saw him,” she says. “He was long gone before I was thought of, but they called him Laughing John Carver. Story goes he went to the well to draw water for the master. He looked down the well and couldn’t stop laughing. Master came to see about the water since John was taking too long. Master whipped John, but John kept laughing and saying, ‘Whoa!’
“John wasn’t ever the same since. He picked cotton, plowed, laughed. The Civil War came, he laughed. And every other time he’d look down the well, or up at the moon, and he’d just say, ‘Whoa.’”
Gravity
Tracey Baptiste
You are dancing in this club where the music is loud and everyone has launched into the air en masse and perfectly on the beat. Voices are wrapped around the last word of “We Here for That,” one of the latest Bunji Garlin Carnival anthems. His deep tone fills every space in this hot second-floor room. It covers every writhing body, every flung strand of hair, every curled mote of cigarette smoke. You have finally let loose, hands in the air, wining bigger, and those hip swings have a life of their own. (Wining is a dance that works the waist and hips particular to those born at latitudes approaching zero.) Your hips get close enough to brush the inside seam of the ripped jeans on the boy you are dancing with. You pump your fists higher and lean close enough to his neck to smell the sweat mixed with vanilla-scented cologne that pools at his clavicle. You had to be convinced to come, but your cousins were right. The music is sweet, the crowd is energized, and it’s nice to be at a fête. Maybe you will give this boy your phone number.
You land and jump up again.
A microsecond into this midbeat jump and you feel the pressure of his fingers against you. Hard. Between your legs.
Time slows to infinitesimal units, like you and everyone in this place are being stretched by the mouth of a black hole, making this moment a millennium.
You have only just met this boy. You didn’t catch his name or where he’s from. You only know him in that way you know any boy who asks for a dance in a loud, crowded club.
The boy is grinning with delight at his coup. Maybe he’s even amazed that he has gotten away with the palming of your crotch in this crowded place.
The smile rips from your face with a roughness matched by the tip of his finger.
It is dark in here. So dark that the neon lights looped along the walls reflect off bodies, plastic cups of liquid, and the exposed pipes on the ceiling in a way that makes them seem otherworldly. In this darkness and light, the boy glows purple and orange. Bright. Not dangerous at all.
You notice his perfectly straight, brilliant teeth and wonder how he manages to keep them so white. Your own teeth are crooked and yellow and your parents don’t have the money to get them fixed. Not right now anyway, when you’ve all just arrived in this country and you’re still sleeping on Aunty Alicia’s living room floor on air mattresses. Your father, who can barely fit the bulk of his body on what he has been calling “the plastic raft,” sends reverberating snores through the house every night. Your mother has been sleeping upstairs, since Uncle Andre has not been home. When your cousins are out, calls of “Clara bring me . . .” and “Clara girl, why you taking so long?” come from inside the sealed envelope of your aunt’s bedroom. When you get close enough, your mother opens the door a sliver, takes what they’ve asked for, and gives you a smile that is all tiredness at the edges.
Why Uncle Andre isn’t home is a big secret, like all the rest of the secrets, of which there are many. Family secrets never remain so. Over time, enough whispers get snatched from the air to declassify even the most shocking of them. They cross a threshold into cautionary tales and anecdotes that cast meaning into stories nobody has all the pieces to. Over half-cooked pots of fish stew or partially cleaned bowls of rice, someone will say, “You don’t remember how Celeste get thin, thin, thin after the surgery?” to explain why Cousin So-and-So was suddenly slim. Or “How you ent see what Jodi do to Mannish car when she catch him?” would fill in the gaps of why This One or That One’s car had been by the mechanic for so long. The secrets of your family stretch from the south of Trinidad all the way to a thin-walled bedroom in Brooklyn, New York, where you can hear your aunt sobbing, and your mother saying, “You know, you better off.”
This long-limbed boy who you yourself chose to dance with after scanning the room and skirting the edges for thirty minutes has gripped you. It’s a surprise. You are only steeled against the possibility of assault on Carnival Monday and Tuesday in the heat and crowds of Queen’s Park Savannah. But there, you have your defenses in place: a phalanx of friends, somebody’s older brother, and failing either of these two options, there is always the defense of keeping your wining behind at home in front of the TV. This pussy grab—for now—is one more secret. And what is one more secret, eh?
You know that girls who run their mouths get the spotlight turned on them. Quiet girls go unnoticed. Loud ones get called fast. Slow girls have their own problems. They are too slow to realize, to get out of the way, to avoid the things that will turn into secrets they have to keep.
In this moment that has stretched out to infinity, fresh beads of sweat spring from your pores. It’s an involuntary evolutionary response designed to prevent you from overheating, from succumbing to a moment of danger. The chill of your own sweat causes yo
ur entire body to constrict: muscles, mind, thoughts. Everything presses in as if the black hole dilating time is you yourself.
This is when you remember, wasn’t it you who smiled at him first?
Your toes are just off the floor, defying gravity with this jubilant crowd, still headed upward as you try to think of a way to separate his hand from your body without making a fuss, without causing an incident, and without everyone in this club seeing beyond his fingers to what they always see—a girl who is fast, who asked for it, who likes it that way.
You want to avoid alerting your cousins Xavia and Zora, who like drama, who you have only known for three short weeks, and for whom this incident could go in unpredictable ways.
But nearing the tip of the jump, you realize that Xavia’s head is thrown back in laughter, and that Zora’s box braids are midwhip. Neither of them has noticed.
Yet.
Midjump, you are still the girl they thought you were: a nice Catholic girl, fresh off the boat, real country.
Your body and this boy’s are still locked together, hovering in that moment at the vertex before gravity takes hold. Bunji’s gravelly note holds in midair with you. Everything you know about physics tells you that where you go from here is a predetermined arc. Unless some new force changes your trajectory, your destiny is to fall back to the sticky floor with this problem still firmly in place.
Is it possible to wrench yourself free? Twist somehow and come loose? You calculate the danger of this. You have seen rejected boys’ backlash marked across the faces of girls. And what if your movement isn’t smooth and silent? One of the cousins might turn. Look. See. Then what? Their part of the equation has too many unknown factors. You cannot solve for X or Z.
The fact of his hand between your legs on a crowded dance floor is a complicated matter, but only for you. For him, it is simple. Pleasure. Delight. For you, there will be questions. If not from the cousins, then from any and everyone else. Why did you wear a skirt? Why were you at that party? Were you talking to him before? Why would he just do that to you with no provocation?
It will not matter that this is the first time you have been in this situation. His hand will say something about you before you can say anything at all about yourself. You have seen this before.
There was the time that Myesha, crushing on Devon, let him lead her behind the cricket pitch off San Fernando Hill, past the row of bike racks, to the space underneath the stairs, so he could kiss her. That was her first time, too. She had loosened her uniform tie and unbuttoned the top button of her crisp white shirt, and boasted that Devon was going to kiss her that day. Right in front of everyone. But when it came to it, he had requested privacy. And she had said yes. She went off, and all you were thinking was how did she manage to keep her shirt so crisp in the hot Trinidad air, when you were a sodden mess every morning before first bell. But when they came back, her crisp white uniform shirt was torn at the shoulder, with a streak of dirt across her chest, and there was a brightening hibiscus-pink bruise at the side of her lip that bloomed brilliantly against her skin.
You ran toward her, but she shook her head and lowered her eyes in a way that made you stop in your tracks. Then the two of you walked home, pushing your bikes in the kind of sudden rain that leaves you soaked and then dries up instantly in the beaming sun, and you didn’t talk about it again between you. But the next morning, someone leaned over during assembly and said, “You hear about Myesha behind the cricket pitch?” It was almost like she had been there alone, like she had assaulted herself. So you tried to explain and they laughed and said, “Is she own fault. Why you would go back there with a boy?” And the truth was, you knew you wouldn’t. Good girls like you in your starched uniforms of pleated plaid skirts, white shirts, and ties didn’t do things like that. So then who was really to blame?
Maybe if Myesha had stayed with the rest of you, then Devon would have taken someone else under the steps. And then everyone would be talking about her instead. That other girl would have been the shield that protected the rest of you. A sacrificial girl. You figure this was probably why Solange and Fatima whispered when Myesha and Devon disappeared the day before, lowering their eyes and keeping their conversation behind their hands. The next day, they side-eyed you both and refused to say anything at all. At lunchtime you discovered someone wrote “Devon is a pig” on the bathroom wall, and it wasn’t Myesha who put it there. First, you know her handwriting, and second, you asked her. When she followed you into the stall and saw it, she cried. It was no comfort to her that someone else knew and hadn’t told. So you asked if she was going to tell, and she just ran out into the hallway, leaving you there to add “Yes he is” on your own.
“Yes he is” slingshots you to the present, with the weight of your situation crashing into you. You who were convinced to put on Xavia’s tight red T-shirt. You who slipped on Zora’s skirt that was inches short of regulation length. (You checked. It did not come as far as your fingertips when you held your hands against your thighs.) You who cannot break free of the pressure of this pinpoint in time and space.
You return to the past, to how you and Myesha collided and fell apart. You didn’t want the stain of her mistake, so for days, a week, two weeks, as Myesha settled into her new role, you steered clear. Then one day your mother said, “Show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are,” which made you realize that the fact of Myesha and Devon under the stairs was not something just the Saint Theresa’s girls and the Saint Michael’s boys knew. The whole of San Fernando knew. This secret was all up and down High Street, heard in the choking exhaust of after-school maxi taxis, and spinning off the fan blades in every store. It was another one of those secrets that was anything but.
Myesha would become a cautionary tale. An anecdote.
You became extra careful. When the Saint Mike’s boys went right, you toggled left. A zig for a zag. You buttoned your short-sleeve uniform shirt all the way to your sweaty throat and pulled your hair back into a single French braid that even Myesha called the “unsexiest hairstyle” she’d ever seen on the one occasion she tried to talk to you since you started avoiding her.
But then she started wearing her hair like that, too, and then you switched to two cornrows just to be different, just in case anyone thought you two were still friends. And when she called you a “C U next Tuesday,” Fatima and Solange said, “That’s how these kind of girls are.” You knew different. But you said nothing.
Then the visas came through and the whole family was leaving for the States, so you started to count down the time and wear your hair the regular way again, down around your shoulders. Things would be different in America. You could make other choices. Better ones. Start fresh.
But here you are, hovering over this dance floor, and the only thing that has changed is the location.
Even before you left Trinidad, before this awful moment, you were awash in guilt. You left a note for Myesha and slowly began to lose hope she would respond to it, up until your last day of class, when you found a folded piece of paper in your bag, and you smiled at her. Even though she looked away, you decided to save it until you got home. But the moment you read it, you wished you hadn’t waited. Still unfolding in your fingers, you read the words, “Good luck,” and the email address Solange_cutie02, and the curvature on the letters, the upswing of the loops, were just like another set of writing you’d seen in a bathroom stall a few weeks before.
So you left the country without a word from Myesha, and with the understanding that Solange had used your friend as a sacrificial lamb.
In Brooklyn, with no school uniform and no regulation-length skirts enforced by nuns, you stuck to jeans and baggy tees that read “MAY THE BE WITH YOU,” or “ 23 Σπ and it was delicious” and kept to yourself. But tonight you are at a club, about to come back down to earth, where all things fall apart. Another fact of physics. Because it is the hardness of the floor, and the abrupt halt in momentum, and the unyielding nature of the surface, that causes
a thing to crack. Even if it is not that thing’s fault. And then we talk about this thing being broken, or it needing to be fixed, and not what part the floor has played in the matter. Never the part about the floor being a constant threat. Even if it is a nice floor. Even if everybody wants one just like it.
Heading back to the ground, gravity presses your weight into him. You squirm. The idea that he might think you are participating makes you want to vomit.
But you have one chance. There is one slim fact in your favor. While gravity pulls you down, as the earth spins on its axis, and the solar system hurtles through space, and the entire universe stretches, all invisible forces acting on you, well, who can stay steady in all that?
Your toes touch first, pressing into the floor as the song thuds out a drumbeat. Then your heel comes down. Your knees bend, wanting to bounce back. But instead you succumb to the forces tugging at you. You fall. No, you genuflect. It’s a moment of prayer that this will work. His hand slips away. His nails scrape your skin and you wince, then feel relief as he detaches. All eyes turn as Xavia’s and Zora’s arms reach to catch you. Others watch. They are a combination of surprised and amused.
You see that the smile slips from his face. He has lost his handle on the situation. He doesn’t try to help you. He watches you crash to the ground.
Only, you do not crash. Your leg shoots out from under you and collides with his. The force of the impact is enough to throw him off-balance. The shock of it leaves him with no time to break his own fall.
Time resets to its usual speed.
You rebound to your feet, and as you watch him tumble into people nearby, you wonder if that little flick of your leg seemed like an accident, or if it looked deliberate. You smile and narrow your eyes. He sees it. He pulls in his lips between his teeth and spits out, “Bitch.” Xavia screams, louder than the brass section behind Bunji Garlin’s next soulful note, “Watchu say ’bout my girl?”
